FRESH OFF THE PRESS: The feds published new statistics on school crime this morning, one day after the 10th anniversary of the horrific school shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School.
The report, which is published jointly by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Institute of Education Sciences,
and the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice, draws together data from several national surveys and studies.
The report says that, in the 2006-07 school year, the most recent year included in the report, there were 27 homicides on K-12 school campuses. That’s an uptick from the 19 in-school murders that took place the previous year, but it’s still less than 2 percent of the total number of youth homicides for that year.
In fact, as a percentage of all youth homicides, the number of murders at school has remained in the same general range for all 11 years of the survey — and that’s including the 1998-99 school year, when 13 people lost their lives in the Columbine massacre. (To read more about what researchers have learned since that tragedy, see my story here.)
Ironically, the opposite is true for thefts among young people, most of which occur in school. According to the study, for every 1,000 12- to 18-year-olds in 2006, 34 were victims of theft while they were on campus. The number of reported thefts that occurred away from school that year, in comparison, was 25 per 1,000 students.